The Methods Committee held its second meeting of the CC "year" in London on a slightly colder March day than it had been for its January meeting in Winchester. Your correspondent was obviously being punished for an inadequate report last time as he was persuaded to repeat the exercise for this meeting. This seems like having to do one's "corrections" at school, but it may have been just punishment for inadvertently wearing odd socks!
Once again, early items on the agenda were passed nem. com. so the RW Diary could be discussed early and at length. This time there were a couple of interesting points raised in routine correspondence with the chairman. One was a proposal to Council to have some mechanism of allowing the naming of methods, on seven or more bells, via the medium of a quarter peal. The second is one of those that gives the lie to a commonly held opinion. This is that "no one is interested in extension". In fact, there were five separate enquiries, involving at least a dozen methods, in less than three months for extensions of previously rung methods.
One item of interest before the Diary was taken. Once again, it is a misconception that the Central Council in some way "approves peals". This may have been the case at one time, but is not the case now. It records all performances either in the analysis or as those performances which don't comply with the decisions. Therefore, the meeting felt that The Ringing World should not feel obliged to "pre-sort" "peals" submitted for publication. In fact, compliant performances are anonymous; non-compliant performances get individual mention. ("There's only one thing worse than being talked about …") It was remarked that a peal on a simulator with the bell sounds replaced by in-tune duck quacks would be going a bit too far, however.
Once again, the first of the Diary 2008 business was taken up with sorting out mistakes in last year's.
The Diary business was interrupted by lunch and the discussions followed its usual eclectic mixture. We remarked that, instead of Brie, our host should have served us recordable DVDs as these had been interchanged in the RPI "shopping basket". We discussed St. Katharine Cree, our host's recently acquired private ring and traffic cameras. One member remarked that it was discovered that his car had the wrong-sized wheels and every distance was 10% further with the correct ones. We even anticipated the following week's RW headline by discussing the Oxford Movement.
As to the Diary, a suggestion of including place notations for those methods appearing just as blue lines was thought not to be practicable and it was remarked that two compositions of Stedman Cinques on p.91 were in fact 1313s, not 1311s.
And that was almost it. The XML specification section of the agenda was mercifully brief and there was next to no AOB.
ROBIN WOOLLEY
The Ringing World, April 27, 2007, page 431